In North America, between 13 and 11.5 ka, around 30 species of large herbivorous mammals became extinct. Much the same occurred in Australia around 45 ka. Both cases roughly coincided with the entry of anatomically modern humans, where neither they nor earlier hominids had lived earlier. Such extinctions are not apparent in the Pleistocene records of Africa or Eurasia. An obvious implication is that initial human colonisation and a collapse of local megafaunas are somehow connected, perhaps even that highly efficient early hunting bands slaughtered and ate their way through both continents. But other possibilities can not be ruled out, including coincidences between colonisation and climate or ecosystem change. As many as thirteen different hypotheses await resolution, one that inevitably makes headline news repeatedly: that both the early Clovis culture and North American megafaunas met their end around the same time as the start of the Younger Dryas millennial cold snap because a meteorite exploded above North America (http://earth-pages.co.uk/2009/03/01/comet-slew-large-mammals-of-the-americas/). One problem in assessing the various ideas is accurately dating the actual extinctions, partly because terrestrial environments rarely undergo the continual sedimentation that builds up easily interpreted stratigraphic sequences. Another is that it is not easy to prove, say, that all giant kangaroos died in a short period of time because of the poor record of preservation of skeletons on land. A cautionary take concerns the demise of the woolly mammoth that roamed the frigid deserts of northern Eurasia and definitely was hunted by both modern humans and Neanderthals. It was eventually discovered that herds still survived on Wrangell Island until the second millennium BC. There is a need for a proxy that charts indirectly the fate of megafaunas plus accurate estimates of the timing of human colonisation. In North America there is a candidate for the first criterion: traces of a fungus (Sporormiella – see Fungal clue to fate of North American megafauna in EPN of January 2010) that exclusively lives in the dung of large herbivores. Fungal spores get everywhere, being wind-dispersed, and in NE US lake cores they fell abruptly at about 13.7 ka. Sporormiella needs to pass through the gut of herbivores to complete its life cycle.

The same genus of fungus breaks down dung in Australia. Measuring spore content in sediment on the floor of a Queensland lake shows the same abrupt decline in abundance at between 43 to 39 ka before present (Rule, S. et al. 2012. The aftermath of a megafaunal extinction: ecosystem transformation in Pleistocene Australia. Science, v. 335, p. 1483-1486). Moreover, the fungal collapse is accompanied by a marked increase in fine-grained charcoal – a sign of widespread fires – and is followed by a steady increase in pollen of scrub vegetation at the expense of that of tropical rain forest trees. The shifts do not correlate with any Southern Hemisphere climatic proxy for cooling and drying that might have caused ecosystem collapse. That still does not mark out newly arrived humans as the culprits, as the early archaeological record of Australia, as in North America, is sparse and only estimated to have started at around 45 ka. Yet this is quite strong circumstantial evidence. The 20 or more animals – marsupials, birds and reptiles – with a mass more than 40 kg that formerly inhabited the continent would probably have been ‘naive’ as regards newly arrived, organised, well-armed and clever new predators, as would those of North America and much later in New Zealand, and would have been ‘easy prey’. Incidentally, faunas of both Africa and Eurasia are extremely wary of humans, possibly as a result of a far longer period of encounters with human hunter-gatherers.  In Australia’s case, the use of deliberate fire clearing to improve visibility of game may have had a major role, although it is equally likely that the demise of large herbivores would have left large amounts of leaf litter and dry grasses to combust naturally. Yet the Earth as a whole around 40 ka was slowly cooling and drying towards the last glacial maximum around 20 ka, so human influence may merely have pushed the megafauna towards extinction, such is the fragility of Australia’s ecosystems.

Related articles

• Butchered sloth bone lends more evidence to early North American settlement (canada.com)
• Demise of large animals caused by both man and climate change (yubanet.com)
• Cave yields marsupial fossil haul (bbc.co.uk)
• Australia extinctions due to Man (bbc.co.uk)